 Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart-Turner and this is Sustainable Hawaii, airing live every Tuesday at noon at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Achieving a more sustainable Hawaii requires more sustainable transportation systems on all islands. A transportation system is truly sustainable if it reduces environmental impacts to net zero while providing safe and equal access to all members of society regardless of their socioeconomic level. Leading this criteria for our land transportation systems involves reducing the proportion of cars and increasing the supply and quality of alternative modes of travel. Our guests today will discuss multimodal land transportation planning and the intricacies of setting and achieving mode share targets for Hawaii. Both our guests are graduates of the University of Hawaii Urban and Regional Planning Department. Blue Planet Foundation's Clean Transportation Director, Shem Lawler, has brought with him fellow bike share expert, Daniel Alexander, who serves as Advocacy Planning and Communication Director for the Hawaii Bicycling League. Welcome Daniel and welcome back Shem. Thank you. It's delightful to have you as usual and especially to talk about what people really don't understand. What are modes and what are mode shares? So a mode is just any way that people get around. So one mode would be car. There would be public transportation, bus or train, bicycling or walking or also common modes that are measured. A mode share is the ratio or the percentage of people that take individual modes. So for example, if you looked at Oahu, about 78% of Oahu workers commute to work by auto bills. So the auto mode share is about 78%. Wow, that actually sounds very, very high, particularly for a small island state. What does that compare to other places? It is for the U.S. in general, it's probably about average. I would say given our local conditions, we have fairly dense development. It's actually pretty poor. We could do a lot better. Daniel, I'm curious how is transportation infrastructure planning done today to support mode sharing or maybe not support it? Well, I'll tell you, we're in a time of change in the way we approach transportation but some of the old tools, the legacy of the past approach is still with us. And one of the prominent things is what's called level of service. And what that primarily looks at is how fast vehicles are getting through a given street. And so what that normally means is we end up putting more lanes in. And really the only unit of analysis is someone driving in a car. We don't even think about carpooling at that point. But what we're increasingly moving towards is a more complete streets and multimodal approach where we think about other modes. And I think mode share is potentially one of the tools that will help us get there. It's interesting to me that that's the only way we've measured it. What about vehicle miles traveled? Is that not something? Is that just pertaining to highways? Well, so here in Hawaii, we don't use vehicle miles traveled to help us determine what the road should look like. And really one of the, I guess, most harmful approaches with the level of service right now is when we look at development, when we do an environmental impact statement, it really looks at how many cars it's going to put on the road. And what it does is it ends up requiring developers to do things like add turn lanes, add lanes to a road, which often actually makes it a less hospitable environment for those walking and biking and really just enables more driving. Well, you mentioned complete streets and it's something that we've discussed on this show before with some of our urban planner guests. How is, and a lot of people may not know what the complete streets planning model is. Tell us about that and how it helps. So complete streets is an approach where you think about all modes, where you think about people walking, people biking, people taking transit, people with disabilities, as well as people driving. So really it's a way of thinking about our transportation system. We're lucky that through the leadership of our city council in 2012, we passed a very strong complete streets ordinance that requires our transportation departments to be thinking about all of this whenever they're doing a transportation project. So, Shem, I know they have to take that into consideration. But is there a law in the books that requires them to apply complete streets methodology and are developers to respond to that? So the complete streets ordinance, as I understand it, at the county level has to do with whenever the city goes in and touches the road. So it's more on the transportation side. So if the city is going to repave a road, they have to look at adding bike lanes or those kind of things. What we really wanted to help change is kind of the systematic approach to transportation planning. And that's where setting mode share goals and mode share targets can really be beneficial. So a mode share target is something that's very high level. It can actually can be neighborhood specific or county specific or city specific, but it's a very high level way of thinking about transportation. So for example, if the city were to set a mode share target for public transit of 20%, then they would be looking at all the policies and individual development and roads and complete streets of everything aiming towards that high level policy. So it's a much more overall approach that helps coordinate the individual policies and efforts that go into it. Now I know that there are some cities, particularly on the West Coast, Vancouver and Seattle that have done this. What are their targets and how are they doing in achieving them? Right. So that's correct. Two of the best examples of city setting mode share targets are Seattle and Vancouver. Several, a number of years ago, Vancouver set a mode share target to by the year 2020 have more than half of all trips to from and within the city by walking, biking or transit. So that means less than half the trips by automobile. They have already surpassed that today. So this graph that we have up is for Vancouver. Correct. In 2012, they updated their goals. And now the new goal of by 2040, they want to have more than two-thirds of all trips by walking, biking and transit. Well, that probably explains why we all love going to Vancouver. It's such a hospitable city. I'll say in Europe, these sort of goals are prominent as well. When it went to some of the great cities like Copenhagen or Vienna, these are really guiding principles for the way they're developing. And they developed actually rather more naturally that way because they have been accommodating pedestrians for centuries. How are we going to make that shift to bring in what has always been a very car-oriented society to bring in the multimodal and complete street infrastructure? So I think actually some of our neighborhoods, Anahu and elsewhere in the state, are actually not that car-oriented development. We have some older street car neighborhoods such as Kaimuki. Oh, that's right. And those are the neighborhoods where we do see higher levels of walking and biking. But we know the recipe. And as we're going to develop, we're going to develop a lot more in places like Hulopili and elsewhere. We need to apply that recipe of a connected, mixed-use neighborhood that's relatively dense and has quality transportation options, including transit and good walking and biking. So the new Hulopili development on the West side is incorporating all of this thinking? So I think they're incorporating much of it. Obviously, it's built around a transit station. So that's a big part of it is it's transit-oriented development. I think they could definitely go further. There could be more intention in trying to make it where it minimizes the necessary trips via auto vehicle. And how are we going to make them do that? Well, so that's a really good question you raised. So this is why we believe that having mode share targets are important, because it's pretty easy to say things like, we want sustainable transportation. We want to be a bike-friendly city or county. But typically, when we say things like that or when we put policies like that in place, there's no metrics associated with them. So that means you could put in one bike lane or a share or something, and you've checked that box. Or you could say, we're near the transit station, we've checked that box. What we really want to do is change it so that there's a concrete metric that they have to live by. So a really good example is in Seattle, when they decided to develop this one neighborhood called the South Lake Union neighborhood, they decided that we want to have a goal of less than 40% of all trips in that neighborhood be by car. And so when the developers went into building that neighborhood, instead of doing a normal transportation impact analysis like we would do here, they had designed the project and say how they were going to meet that 40% target. And so they incorporated things like secure bike parking, bike share, car sharing. But ultimately, in order to meet that target, they really had to restrict parking and implement things that really force people not to drive. And so that's what we'd like to see in places like Holopili is have concrete metrics that they have to meet. So they're not just putting in a Kutrimon, that they're actually building to try and hit that target of a specific mode share for transit and bike and walking. And those targets really have to be based in reality. So what is the process of identifying and setting the targets? So I think part of it is that you look at existing conditions. So what the transportation facilities are there, what sort of transit service we already have. And then you look at what's attainable. What can we build in the coming period? And I think the thing is with goals, as we have to remember, there is a certain aspiration in them perhaps or they're setting where we wanna go. It's like we're gonna get towards 100% renewables. We don't know exactly the path, but if we figure out something that is a large reach but attainable, then we will figure out the tools to get us there. Absolutely, and that's, you gave the best example, which is the 100% renewable energy target. And we're really living up to our aspirations so far. So it's exciting to see. I'm gonna be very excited to see how we do this in transportation. Because I think the hardest thing to do is get people out of their cars. Could I give another example? I think the Salt Lake Union that Shem mentioned is a powerful one. But Stanford University has an agreement with the county that it's in that it will add zero new parking spaces on campus. And yet the campus is growing. It's growing by a lot. There are getting more facilities. There are getting more students. There are getting more researchers. So they are having to figure out all these solutions to get people to the campus via something other than car. They're using car share. They have a really great bike share system and bikeway network. They have transit. They're figuring out all these solutions. They have travel demand management where they have people that work with each individual to figure out a way that they cannot drive. So I think when we set those goals, they might seem a little extreme. But there's a lot of innovation out there and there are a lot of strategies that we can use to get there. And it actually spurs. It's very much supports innovation by creating those targets. You know, we had on the show Joanne Yukimura who's a big proponent of the Kauai multimodal transportation plan. Is Kauai the only area in Hawaii that has one? And are we going to really move towards creating a plan or how do the targets fit within that? I'm glad you brought that up. So at the present time, Kauai is the only county in the state that has mojo targets. Back in 2011, 12 when they were doing their land use plan, they decided to really try and merge land use and transportation and look at those two issues together. And they looked at how traffic is increasing and they looked at how much they would have to spend on roadways and they determined there's no way we can pay for that. And so they decided we actually need to reduce the number of cars on the road and try to solve our traffic through reduction rather than accommodating cars. And so they actually at that time in 2012, they set some mojo targets to reduce the number of cars and also particularly single occupant vehicles and increased transit. Now they have a long way to go. They're actually the most car dependent island in the state but they've taken the most important step which is actually looking at the land use and transportation components together and setting goals. Last year, we, Blue Planet, actually submitted a bill to legislature. I'm gonna hold you there. We're gonna take a break and when we come back, we'll find out about this bill that Blue Planet helped sponsor in the legislature. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi with the Think Tech Kauai show, Stacy to the rescue, highlighting some of Hawaii's issues. You can catch it at Think Tech Kauai on Mondays at 11 a.m. Aloha, see you then. Hi, I'm Stan Energyman and I want you to be here every Friday. Noon, thinktechkauai.com, watch the show. Be there. I'll pay you the full weight. I'm Ethan Allen, host of likeable science here on Think Tech Kauai. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world. Scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. They'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, a way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on Think Tech Kauai for likeable science. With me, your host, Ethan Allen. Aloha, we're back with sustainable Hawaii talking about multi-modal, say that three times, transportation planning for Hawaii. And we have Shem Lawler from Blue Planet Foundation and Daniel Alexander from Bike Share Hawaii. And Shem was about to share about the bill that was introduced in the legislature last year that would require transportation planning for the state and some targets. Tell us what happened with that bill and moreover what it contained or we're gonna say it again. Right, so the approach we took last year is we wanted to set in statute a requirement to do the planning. Kauai took the initiative, they did it. We could go to each county and ask them to do it, but even though we have some good administrations in office right now, we thought it would be best if we had a long-term put in statute requirement. Just as a function of transportation planning, this is how you're supposed to do it. So we went to the legislature with the bill last year that required each county to do mode share planning and set mode share targets in six-year increments and then report those mode share targets to the Hawaii Department of Transportation and they would include those in their transportation plan. The bill did quite well. It passed through every committee that it went through in both houses without anybody testifying against it and without anybody on the committee's voting against the bill. It had a lot of support from basically everyone who's involved. Unfortunately in the last committee, they took the language out and replaced it with some emergency funding for the Department of Transportation. And so the bill passed, but it wasn't actually the bill that we had introduced. So it was the victim of some immediate needs. Correct. But not necessarily unsupported. That's correct. So I think this year we're gonna come back with the same approach. We're gonna try and do a little bit more leg work with some of the legislators and some people in the community to build, not necessarily support, but just kind of understanding of the issues and how transportation planning is done now and how this would be a better way. And I think this year we're gonna get it passed. And what is it going to take in order to get the regulations put in place and see the targets set? What kind of community involvement and who are there gonna be the players? So it'll be done at the county level by the counties and each county's a little bit different on how they handle transportation and land use planning. So maybe it might be the Department of Planning and Permitting or the Department of Transportation Services on Oahu or might be a joint effort. It might be the Metropolitan Planning Organization like on Maui, they just created the new one. But I think we wanna be a little bit on the less prescriptive side on the bill and allow the counties to kind of decide how they wanna do the planning. And certainly on Oahu it's gonna depend on the outcome of our charter amendments because they involve changes within the city and county of Honolulu transportation planning, right? Possibly, yes. So there's a charter amendment that would create a committee that would set fares for transit and also bring heart into DTS. I'm not sure. Hearting the rail system into the Department of Transportation Services. Correct. For operations. Yes, yeah. So we think that it would probably take a couple of years to do the planning. There would be some community input. There would be working with the state to see what the infrastructure capacities are. Ultimately, there would be a plan that would probably be adopted by the city councils or the county councils. And then after that, it would be set up to the state. I wanted to interject one thing in here for how important it is that we have such a plan. So we have a long range transportation plan, the Oahu Long Range Transportation Plan. It goes out to 2040. It's all our federal transportation dollars where they're gonna go in local and state. And we're spending $17 billion over the course of that time to get us to 2040. And what does that get us in terms of how many people are still driving and how many miles are occurring? Okay, so vehicle miles traveled will have increased 20%. Under the current plan. Under that plan. Under our $17 billion, we will have more people as a percentage of our population commuting by single occupancy vehicle. So you think about that. We are investing heavily and we have a plan where we thought this through and yet we're getting to outcomes. I don't think many people would support when you actually see that and you tell that to people. Most people would say, that's not the direction we should be going. And I think when we bring in a mode share target like this, we're going to do those plans a different way and we're gonna make investments in a different way. And that's actually a very important point because the other thing that we're going to experience is a huge explosion or further explosion because we've already been experiencing it of the visitor count. And so I've heard some of those forecasts as we're already at 10 million visitors which no one ever imagined. And so we have to accommodate all of them on the road as well. Is this a plan or are the discussions including the leaders in the visitor industry? I think typically they are definitely included as stakeholders when the planning process is done. I think what we're really looking at doing is reversing how we think of it. So you brought the visitor market. Typically the way we do transportation planning now and the reason why we're getting a bad outcome under the current O'ahu Regional Transportation Plan is because the metrics that we're measuring primarily is level of service. And so the solutions to worsening road congestion typically are add more lanes. Mode shares are a completely different way of looking at it. So we say we're gonna have 150,000 tourists. How do we, if we have a mode share target of 20% of them by rental car, how do we achieve that? It's looking at it the outcome first and how do we achieve that versus this somebody we're gonna have, we project they're all gonna continue to drive. So how many more road miles? Exactly, it's a much more proactive approach and it's a paradigm shift because it requires thinking outside the box. And as you mentioned, looking at where we wanna be so these targets are extremely important so that we're driving the boat instead of the boat driving us. Exactly. Absolutely important, yeah. So how can mode share targets be implemented? Daniel, do you want? So, well, I think Shem's went into this a little bit but I think it makes sense for them to occur at the county level and for us to look at almost neighborhood by neighborhood region by region and figure out what are the strategies that are gonna work within those areas to achieve the outcomes. So it requires a coordination also with the general plan and making sure that each community plan, each sustainability plan that all roll into the general plan includes transit oriented development, multimodal transportation planning. It's a lot of coordination. Certainly, I think from the land use and development perspective, that is one of the most influential areas in whether people, how they get around, whether they're close to their jobs, whether they're close to a grocery store and the amenities they routinely visit. So using our land use plans and then when they come in and they're getting different development approvals, if we have a mode share goal in place, we can put that to a large development to say a whole pili and say, how are you going to attain these mode share targets? What are you doing to achieve these? And now I'm going to just be the devil's advocate a little bit here because sometimes people say, it's a dream to say, build it and they will come. We know that this involves major behavioral change in terms of people making those choices differently. One of the things that I attended with Blue Planet regarding transportation, I believe several years ago, was a really cutting edge psychological workshop on how we help people to change their behaviors and be able to move into these multimodal choices that we might have. Are you doing some work on that still at Blue Planet and is bike share must also have a tremendous approach from how to get people out of their cars and on their bikes? That's a really good point. So there's, and they hear this a lot. People say, you know, people in Hawaii, they love their cars, you're not gonna be able to get them out of their cars. I think that there's actually less truth to that than people realize. So if you take someone from Hawaii who born and raised, lived their entire life here and you plug them into Tokyo or to Manhattan or to an area where like Davis, California, where everyone bikes, people tend to very quickly follow the existing norms in those communities. So it's not necessarily something that's ingrained in people. A lot of it has to do with what infrastructure exists, so if we have more transit capacity, if we had better bike lanes, then you would see more people taking transit, more people biking, and then that kind of cultural shift kind of automatically happens. So I think it's not that those things aren't necessary, but I think it's not as the car social mindset is not as impactful as people actually think it is. And I think if you look to say the example of Portland, our kind of our bike mecca in the United States, we think about it as just this crazy culture that somehow embraces and loves cycling and that's what it is now. But if you rewind 25 years, 1990, Portland actually looked much worse than Honolulu today. There was around 1% of people commuting by bike. And yet the city took on building bikeways. And over the course of a couple decades, they built a very extensive network of bikeways. And it was true, you build it and they will come. And with that, the culture, the culture that surrounds it in terms of appreciating bikes, going for fun rides and all that stuff, it came as a result of, I think in large part, the infrastructure that was built there. So it's a tried and true, but I think it is very true. You build it and they will come. What was the catalyst for Portland being able to get that done? So there was actually, there was a state law that required that all municipalities in Oregon spend 1% of their transportation funds on bike projects. And Portland hadn't been doing this. This law had been on the books since I think 75. And they got sued by actually the local advocacy, our counterpart in Portland. And the city said, okay, well, we're looking at this. We really haven't been doing it. We're gonna start doing it. And they asked it for a stay of the suit. Basically they would start doing it. And it set them on the track where they said, okay, we're gonna do this and we're gonna do it vigorously. And they got the positive feedback and that people were using the bike ways and it was improving the overall transportation system. And we know that it's also improved their visitor attractiveness because a lot of folks go to Portland specifically to enjoy the outdoors and within the city get around without the hassle of a rental car. Something that we haven't hit on but livability is such a big component. I mean, the livability of sitting in your car and sitting in traffic is not high. But of being able to walk someplace and take transit on a reliable transit system, the livability of being able to bike to work, to be able to bike to the grocery or to be able to bike your kids to school. I mean, those are things that people value. And these are the kind of broader benefits we can get beyond the energy and beyond facilitating development in a harmonious way. I'm just wondering how schools are gonna be tied into this transportation plan and how we're gonna include kids' perspectives because we know that they're the best teachers to get their parents to change. So are you planning for school outreach or are you already doing that and making sure that schools are major stakeholders at the table and discussing the plans? Well, it's actually a really interesting issue with schools in Hawaii. Particularly on Oahu, we have a very high percentage of students that go to private schools. And so compared to most communities, we have more students commuting with their parents driving them to school. And that adds quite a bit of traffic congestion to our roadways. So I think an important part of our mode share planning and our overall transportation plan is looking at how to address, how to facilitate students getting to school in ways that are a little bit more sustainable. Maybe it's a better transit system and a safer one where the parents feel comfortable putting their children on transit system. We also don't have school buses, so we're looking at increasing school buses. In the last minute that we have, I'd like to show what has been a tremendous success for Bike Share Hawaii, the King Street track. And can you tell us about it and how it's working? So the King Street protected bike lane, these protected bike lanes are the gold standard in Denmark and the Netherlands and Europe. And they're growing across the US and show that when you're in that protected environment where there's physical separation between U-Bicycle lane and motor vehicle traffic, that all sorts of people that don't feel comfortable mixing in traffic suddenly are like, great, I wanna cycle. We've seen about a doubling of ridership, yeah, which is just pretty phenomenal and pretty much everyone's come off the sidewalks and they're in the bike lane now. I think this is the recipe. Once we build a network of these, we're gonna see tons and tons of people cycling. That's exciting. And those are planned in the transportation plan, but also are they just planned before we even get to a plan? So we have a plan, the city has a plan. We just need to implement that plan. Terrific. Well, thank you very much, you guys. We look forward to hearing the updates as we move along and especially supporting your efforts with the bill. This has been Sustainable Hawaii. Join us every Tuesday at noon at thinktechhawaii.com. Aloha.